“An Unaccountable Secretive National Hedge Fund”

A reader sent in this provocative observation by mathematician and economist Eric Weinstein:

Many of us who work in finance are even more horrified by what we see than the lay public appears to be. Some of us spoke publically for years about the dangers posed. Others published papers or books to spread the word. Curiously, however, our country’s laws would not even permit average families to voluntarily invest in those hedge funds that profited from this crisis by, for example, shorting subprime mortgages.

Accordingly, we don’t believe that citizenship in the United States should now hurriedly be converted into forced participation in an unaccountable secretive national hedge fund which buys lousy assets at inflated prices from banks mismanaged for personal profit by multi-millionaires, and makes non-consensual capital calls on uninformed, captive, financially unsophisticated families.

Oddly, that’s not hyperbole. That’s a description of what has taken place. It’s the reality that’s objectively outrageous.